ABSTRACT
Proletarian riot, the Playful Giant’s boisterousness, ‘tends to anarchy’; but so does ‘our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of “every man for himself”. Modern university novels construct an initial image of Oxford congruent with this intention: an Oxford that floats free from, is sharply differentiated from, proletarian towns and cities. Aristocrat and proletarian work together for the common good. Stewart proposes an alliance between aristocracy and proletariat against the crass bourgeoisie. The sense of aristocratic Oxbridge assailed by proletarians and utilitarian middling folk structures many accounts of life among students and teaching staff. Nick Junkin is a proletarian son from Coketown, Dickens’s disguise for Preston in Hard Times. Privilege must be defended in Oxford and Cambridge, for proletarian and utilitarian attacks on those places are merely the prelude to a much wider attack on central symbols of English culture.
